This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The one-story home 100 yards from Lāhainā Harbor where Tiare Lawrence grew up was a typical Hawaiʻi plantation home, a historic architectural style with a wide-hipped roof, a wooden light blue exterior, and a purple bougainvillea bush in the front yard.

It’s where her grandmother grew up, and her mother and aunties and uncles too. For more than a century, her family held onto the home, even as the number of Native Hawaiian families in Lāhainā dwindled, property taxes rose, and the town around them morphed into a tourism hub. In high school, Lawrence would wake up at dawn before school and carry her surfboard from the carport to her favorite surf spot, paddling as the sun’s rays softly lightened the West Maui sky. 

Her voice breaks when she talks about it now: the banana patch her grand-uncle tended, the countless family gatherings, the family photos now lost forever after the house burned in a vicious wildfire last summer. 

Thursday will mark one year since a wildfire ripped through Lāhainā, killing more than 100 people in the deadliest wildfire in modern United States history. The violent inferno devastated the coastal community, burning more than 2,000 buildings and displacing thousands of residents. This week, the community has scheduled many events to commemorate the disaster: surfers will paddle out en masse, families will gather at the Lāhainā Civic Center, and more than 100 Kānaka Maoli sixth graders will put on a stage production to honor the history of the town, once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. 

The anniversary comes on the heels of a $4.037 billion tentative settlement announced Friday. In the wake of the fires, victims filed hundreds of lawsuits against the utility believed to have sparked the fire and the landowners whose dry grasslands served as ready fuel. Settlement talks were delayed in part due to a fight over who should get paid first, the victims or insurance companies. More than 100 insurers filed lawsuits to recoup billions they’ve already paid out.

“We have one shot to do this right,” the organizations posted on social media. “And while individual cash payouts are crucial to the immediate relief of many, they donʻt get us much closer to that collective objective.”

That issue still hadn’t been resolved when Hawaiʻi Gov. Josh Green announced Friday that the parties had reached a proposed settlement. The bulk of the money—$1.99 billion—will come from Hawaiian Electric, an amount that’s expected to enable the utility to avoid bankruptcy. It’s not yet clear how the rest of the funding will be split up amongst other defendants, which include the State of Hawaiʻi and Maui County as well as private entities. Insurers have 90 days to resolve their claims in the wake of the tentative agreement.

So there are still many unanswered questions about when Maui residents will actually get their money, and how the funding would be split amongst survivors, attorneys, and insurance companies. But once those questions are answered, the settlement could be a crucial boost to displaced families and a remarkably quick conclusion to litigation that elsewhere has dragged on for years. 

It would also be yet another data point underscoring the high cost of wildfire disasters, which are expected to grow more frequent as climate change worsens. Last year, PacifiCorp agreed to pay $299 million to victims of the 2020 Archie Creek fire in Oregon, with plaintiffs receiving an average of $646,000 each. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric settled claims related to the deadly Camp Fire that killed 85 people for $13.5 billion as part of their bankruptcy case. 

On the West Coast, the pattern of devastation followed by lawsuits and large settlements has become a familiar cadence, one that’s been criticized for its lack of effectiveness in making victims whole. Sometimes, recipients see big tax bills that cut into needed payouts. Others argue the litigation is merely a Band-Aid on the underlying problem of climate change, allowing the federal government—it generally isn’t a defendant—to continue to duck its role in facilitating fossil fuel emissions. 

In Hawaiʻi, grassroots organizations are concerned that individual settlements will fall short of addressing the expensive infrastructure improvements that are needed in order for the community to truly rebuild. Several groups like the Lāhainā Community Land Trust sent a letter to litigation parties in July urging them to consider including funding for a master-planned community and other necessities in the discussions. Four billion is a third of the $12 billion estimated overall cost of the disaster.

“We have one shot to do this right,” the organizations posted on social media. “And while individual cash payouts are crucial to the immediate relief of many, they donʻt get us much closer to that collective objective.”

Not everyone is tracking the settlement closely. Randy Dadez, whose rental home burned down in the fire, hadn’t seen last week’s headlines about a looming settlement because he’s been busy working as a shuttle driver for a West Maui hotel and taking care of his wife and four kids. 

“I have zero thought about money, to be honest with you,” he said. “To be honest, money is the furthest thing from my mind.” 

Instead, he’s worrying about his four kids, aged 9 through 22, and the stress they’ve been under since they became homeless in the disaster. For months they bounced around between hotels: first the Fairmont, then the Hyatt, then a long stretch in Honua Kai Resort, then the Royal Lahaina. It wasn’t until last month that the Federal Emergency Management Administration finally moved them into a house. But they’re only there until February. After that, Dadez doesn’t know what’s next. 

Of course money would help, he said. His dad’s house, which had been in the family since 1938, burned down, and it didn’t have insurance. Rebuilding would be costly: home construction costs on Maui can easily run $350 per square foot, or more than half a million dollars for a 1,500-square-foot house.

But Dadez is skeptical about how far any settlement money would actually go, and is a lot more concerned with juggling his daily responsibilities, including ferrying his wife and children to and from medical appointments for migraines, scoliosis, anxiety, and various other maladies.

“All I pray for is that we have good health and I tell the Lord if there’s anything extra, it’s OK,” he said. 

Lawrence, the Native Hawaiian community organizer, is also watching settlement news skeptically. She wasn’t living at her family home the day of the fire. But her grand-uncle, her sister, and her brother were all in Lāhainā and managed to escape. Lawrence has spent the past year raising money for disaster relief and coordinating community projects. She’s also watched family after family leave, moving to Oregon, Washington state, and Las Vegas. What she wants most of all is for the settlement money to go to Lāhainā families to enable them to rebuild their community. She thinks of her 82-year-old grand-uncle. He’s doing OK, but doesn’t have decades to wait.

“He, like everyone else, would rather be home,” she said.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The poignancy was unmistakable: Prognosticators at Colorado State University amended their already miserable seasonal tropical cyclone forecast on Monday precisely as Hurricane Beryl was filling Houston’s streets with floodwater and knocking out power to more than 2m homes and businesses.

“A likely harbinger of a hyperactive season” was how CSU researchers characterized Beryl, which set numerous records on the way to its Texas landfall, including the earliest category 5 hurricane, strongest ever June storm, and most powerful to strike the southern Windward Islands.

In the Caribbean, the storm caused almost unprecedented destruction, and killed dozens from Grenada to the United States.

With the six-month Atlantic hurricane season only six weeks old, and a monster storm such as those only usually seen in the later, peak months already in the books, climate scientists fear for what’s to come.

Climate change has “got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended.”

They also warn that nobody should be surprised about the eye-popping start to the 2024 season, or the rapid intensification of Beryl from a modest tropical storm into a deadly 165 mph cyclone, because of “crazy” ocean heat that acts like rocket fuel for developing hurricanes.

“It’s a big wake-up call, certainly for folks in the US and throughout the Caribbean, that a greater risk for more extreme hurricanes is certainly there, and with warmer waters into the late spring we’re getting an earlier start to the hurricane season,” Brett Anderson, senior climate scientist with AccuWeather, told the Guardian.

“We’re seeing these types of storms developing very quickly, more so than 20 to 30 years ago, with all that warm water in place. Science has become really good with computer models forecasting the tracks of these storms, but intensity is still a challenge. Rapid intensification certainly we’re very concerned about, especially when these things get closer to the coast.”

It’s an old adage in hurricane season that it only takes one storm to make it an active season. On Monday, the team at Colorado state, one of the most respected in the forecasting business, predicted even more of them.

They now expect six major hurricanes with sustained wind speed above 111mph, and 12 hurricanes overall, before the season ends on November 30.

In April, they predicted five major hurricanes from 11, both scenarios matching the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction in May of a season well above the average of seven hurricanes and three major cyclones.

The meteorologists are confident that the alphabetical list of 21 names allocated when a disturbance becomes at least a 39 mph tropical storm will be depleted this year for only the fourth time since 2005. Previously that had not happened since the naming convention began in 1950.

“We’re at well over a year now, probably 15 or so months of record breaking or close to record breaking ocean heat, and when I say close I mean comparing 2024 with 2023, so well above any previous year,” said Brian McNoldy, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.

“When a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”

“Obviously we have climate change acting on everything, it’s got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended. There are other things going on,” he said. “Last year, yes, we had these record-smashing warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic, but we also started to get a stronger El Niño as the year went on, and all things being equal El Niño acts to reduce Atlantic hurricane activity.

“It probably did to some degree, but thanks to the ocean temperatures being so warm it ended up being an above average hurricane season anyway.”

Beryl, meanwhile, reinforced one often overlooked aspect of a coastal hurricane strike, the spawning of tornados and flooding far inland that can be equally as destructive and deadly. Beryl’s reach extended as far as New England, and caused fatalities in Texas, Louisiana, Vermont. AccuWeather’s initial estimate of economic loss in the US is up to $32 billion.

“People need to be prepared for these kinds of storms,” said Matt Marshall, AccuWeather’s senior director for strategic projects. “More die from water than wind in a hurricane, but people track storms by the wind speed. We use a real impact scale for wind, storm surge intensity, how much rain is going to fall and therefore how much flooding there’s going to be from rain, and it uses the overall economic impact expected by the storm to capture how much damage there’s going to be overall.”

“We anticipated extended power outages in Texas,” he said. “We anticipated the flooding rain coming up through the Great Lakes and into New England, we anticipated the potential tornado outbreak to the east and north of the storm track so things are pretty well aligned with what we forecast.”

As the frequency and intensity of storms continue to escalate, Marshall added, so will the cost: “They’re causing more damage, the cost of materials has gone up, the cost of supply chains is going up. So when a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When the Federal Emergency Management Agency spends millions of dollars to help rebuild schools and hospitals after a hurricane, it tries to make the community more resilient than it was before the storm. If the agency pays to rebuild a school or a town hall, for example, it might elevate the building above the floodplain, lowering the odds that it will get submerged again.

That sounds simple enough, but the policy hinges on a deceptively simple question: How do you define “floodplain”? FEMA and the rest of the federal government long defined it as an area that has a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. That so-called 100-year floodplain standard, though more or less arbitrary, has been followed for decades—even though thousands of buildings outside the floodplain go underwater every year. 

Now FEMA is expanding its definition of the floodplain, following an executive order from President Joe Biden that forced government agencies to tighten rules about how they respond to the increasing risk of floods. In a significant shift, the new standard will require the agency to factor in the impact of climate change on future flood risk when it decides where and how it’s safe to build.

The new rule will result in higher-elevated and better-fortified buildings, and could help break a cycle of destruction and reconstruction that has cost the government billions of dollars over the past few decades. In a press conference announcing the rule, FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell hailed it as a significant change in how the government responds to disasters. 

The rule “will allow us to enhance resilience in flood-prone communities by taking future flood risk into consideration when we rebuild structures post-disaster,” she said. “This is a huge win that will also allow us to end the repeat loss cycles that stem from flooding and increase the safety of families and save taxpayer dollars.” 

Under the new rule, the agency will “integrate current and future changes in flooding based on climate science” when it estimates flood risk, factoring in sea level rise and intensified erosion that will get worse over the course of the century. This will be easiest in coastal areas, where the science about sea level rise and flooding is well established. In riverine areas, where science is less robust, the agency will rebuild at least as high as the 500-year floodplain, or the land that has less than a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in a given year—and sometimes even higher for essential infrastructure such as bridges and hospitals.

“This is a huge win that will also allow us to end the repeat loss cycles that stem from flooding and increase the safety of families and save taxpayer dollars.” 

This is a dramatic shift from previous measurements, which relied on historical data to estimate future flooding. Because climate change has intensified since the collection of that initial data, previously the agency was systematically underestimating climate-related risk. Therefore, the new system assumes that flood risk is much higher than in the past, and that it will keep rising as time goes on. To mitigate that risk, FEMA will build farther from the water wherever possible and will raise structures on stilts and pilings when it can’t pull back from the coast.

“The federal government really has a duty to account for a future flood risk when it’s providing funding to build or rebuild homes or infrastructure, because it’s using taxpayer dollars,” said Joel Scata, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council and an expert on flood policy. Under the new rule, he said, FEMA is “going to be building in a way that’s not setting people and infrastructure up for future failure.”

FEMA has estimated that elevating and flood-proofing structures at this stricter standard could cost the agency as much as an additional $150 million over the next ten years—a proportionally small sum given the agency’s $3 billion annual disaster spending. The agency says that elevating structures by 2 additional feet adds around 2 percent to the cost of the average project, but that this spending will pay for itself over the next 60 years by preventing future damages.

There could still be trickle-down costs for local governments, which often have to pay around 25 percent of the cost when FEMA repairs a damaged school or installs a flood barrier in a community. Many small towns and low-income communities have struggled to provide these matching funds, and they have been excluded from federal resilience grants as a result.

The Biden administration is not the first to consider the 100-year floodplain standard inadequate. Then-President Barack Obama tried to expand the definition after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, but the Trump administration scrapped this revised standard just after taking office. President Biden’s rule has now advanced farther along in the regulatory process than the Obama administration’s rule was able to, which will make it much harder for a potential second Trump administration to repeal it.

Local updates to floodplain standards have already shown results: Houston, Texas, saw three massive floods in consecutive years between 2015 and 2017. After Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017, the city updated its building regulations to prohibit construction in the 500-year floodplain, forcing builders to elevate homes much higher or build farther back from rivers and streams. These standards likely prevented thousands of homes from flooding earlier this week during Hurricane Beryl, which caused several rivers and bayous to overflow and spill onto surrounding land.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The poignancy was unmistakable: Prognosticators at Colorado State University amended their already miserable seasonal tropical cyclone forecast on Monday precisely as Hurricane Beryl was filling Houston’s streets with floodwater and knocking out power to more than 2m homes and businesses.

“A likely harbinger of a hyperactive season” was how CSU researchers characterized Beryl, which set numerous records on the way to its Texas landfall, including the earliest category 5 hurricane, strongest ever June storm, and most powerful to strike the southern Windward Islands.

In the Caribbean, the storm caused almost unprecedented destruction, and killed dozens from Grenada to the United States.

With the six-month Atlantic hurricane season only six weeks old, and a monster storm such as those only usually seen in the later, peak months already in the books, climate scientists fear for what’s to come.

Climate change has “got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended.”

They also warn that nobody should be surprised about the eye-popping start to the 2024 season, or the rapid intensification of Beryl from a modest tropical storm into a deadly 165 mph cyclone, because of “crazy” ocean heat that acts like rocket fuel for developing hurricanes.

“It’s a big wake-up call, certainly for folks in the US and throughout the Caribbean, that a greater risk for more extreme hurricanes is certainly there, and with warmer waters into the late spring we’re getting an earlier start to the hurricane season,” Brett Anderson, senior climate scientist with AccuWeather, told the Guardian.

“We’re seeing these types of storms developing very quickly, more so than 20 to 30 years ago, with all that warm water in place. Science has become really good with computer models forecasting the tracks of these storms, but intensity is still a challenge. Rapid intensification certainly we’re very concerned about, especially when these things get closer to the coast.”

It’s an old adage in hurricane season that it only takes one storm to make it an active season. On Monday, the team at Colorado state, one of the most respected in the forecasting business, predicted even more of them.

They now expect six major hurricanes with sustained wind speed above 111mph, and 12 hurricanes overall, before the season ends on November 30.

In April, they predicted five major hurricanes from 11, both scenarios matching the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction in May of a season well above the average of seven hurricanes and three major cyclones.

The meteorologists are confident that the alphabetical list of 21 names allocated when a disturbance becomes at least a 39 mph tropical storm will be depleted this year for only the fourth time since 2005. Previously that had not happened since the naming convention began in 1950.

“We’re at well over a year now, probably 15 or so months of record breaking or close to record breaking ocean heat, and when I say close I mean comparing 2024 with 2023, so well above any previous year,” said Brian McNoldy, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.

“When a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”

“Obviously we have climate change acting on everything, it’s got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended. There are other things going on,” he said. “Last year, yes, we had these record-smashing warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic, but we also started to get a stronger El Niño as the year went on, and all things being equal El Niño acts to reduce Atlantic hurricane activity.

“It probably did to some degree, but thanks to the ocean temperatures being so warm it ended up being an above average hurricane season anyway.”

Beryl, meanwhile, reinforced one often overlooked aspect of a coastal hurricane strike, the spawning of tornados and flooding far inland that can be equally as destructive and deadly. Beryl’s reach extended as far as New England, and caused fatalities in Texas, Louisiana, Vermont. AccuWeather’s initial estimate of economic loss in the US is up to $32 billion.

“People need to be prepared for these kinds of storms,” said Matt Marshall, AccuWeather’s senior director for strategic projects. “More die from water than wind in a hurricane, but people track storms by the wind speed. We use a real impact scale for wind, storm surge intensity, how much rain is going to fall and therefore how much flooding there’s going to be from rain, and it uses the overall economic impact expected by the storm to capture how much damage there’s going to be overall.”

“We anticipated extended power outages in Texas,” he said. “We anticipated the flooding rain coming up through the Great Lakes and into New England, we anticipated the potential tornado outbreak to the east and north of the storm track so things are pretty well aligned with what we forecast.”

As the frequency and intensity of storms continue to escalate, Marshall added, so will the cost: “They’re causing more damage, the cost of materials has gone up, the cost of supply chains is going up. So when a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When the Federal Emergency Management Agency spends millions of dollars to help rebuild schools and hospitals after a hurricane, it tries to make the community more resilient than it was before the storm. If the agency pays to rebuild a school or a town hall, for example, it might elevate the building above the floodplain, lowering the odds that it will get submerged again.

That sounds simple enough, but the policy hinges on a deceptively simple question: How do you define “floodplain”? FEMA and the rest of the federal government long defined it as an area that has a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. That so-called 100-year floodplain standard, though more or less arbitrary, has been followed for decades—even though thousands of buildings outside the floodplain go underwater every year. 

Now FEMA is expanding its definition of the floodplain, following an executive order from President Joe Biden that forced government agencies to tighten rules about how they respond to the increasing risk of floods. In a significant shift, the new standard will require the agency to factor in the impact of climate change on future flood risk when it decides where and how it’s safe to build.

The new rule will result in higher-elevated and better-fortified buildings, and could help break a cycle of destruction and reconstruction that has cost the government billions of dollars over the past few decades. In a press conference announcing the rule, FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell hailed it as a significant change in how the government responds to disasters. 

The rule “will allow us to enhance resilience in flood-prone communities by taking future flood risk into consideration when we rebuild structures post-disaster,” she said. “This is a huge win that will also allow us to end the repeat loss cycles that stem from flooding and increase the safety of families and save taxpayer dollars.” 

Under the new rule, the agency will “integrate current and future changes in flooding based on climate science” when it estimates flood risk, factoring in sea level rise and intensified erosion that will get worse over the course of the century. This will be easiest in coastal areas, where the science about sea level rise and flooding is well established. In riverine areas, where science is less robust, the agency will rebuild at least as high as the 500-year floodplain, or the land that has less than a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in a given year—and sometimes even higher for essential infrastructure such as bridges and hospitals.

“This is a huge win that will also allow us to end the repeat loss cycles that stem from flooding and increase the safety of families and save taxpayer dollars.” 

This is a dramatic shift from previous measurements, which relied on historical data to estimate future flooding. Because climate change has intensified since the collection of that initial data, previously the agency was systematically underestimating climate-related risk. Therefore, the new system assumes that flood risk is much higher than in the past, and that it will keep rising as time goes on. To mitigate that risk, FEMA will build farther from the water wherever possible and will raise structures on stilts and pilings when it can’t pull back from the coast.

“The federal government really has a duty to account for a future flood risk when it’s providing funding to build or rebuild homes or infrastructure, because it’s using taxpayer dollars,” said Joel Scata, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council and an expert on flood policy. Under the new rule, he said, FEMA is “going to be building in a way that’s not setting people and infrastructure up for future failure.”

FEMA has estimated that elevating and flood-proofing structures at this stricter standard could cost the agency as much as an additional $150 million over the next ten years—a proportionally small sum given the agency’s $3 billion annual disaster spending. The agency says that elevating structures by 2 additional feet adds around 2 percent to the cost of the average project, but that this spending will pay for itself over the next 60 years by preventing future damages.

There could still be trickle-down costs for local governments, which often have to pay around 25 percent of the cost when FEMA repairs a damaged school or installs a flood barrier in a community. Many small towns and low-income communities have struggled to provide these matching funds, and they have been excluded from federal resilience grants as a result.

The Biden administration is not the first to consider the 100-year floodplain standard inadequate. Then-President Barack Obama tried to expand the definition after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, but the Trump administration scrapped this revised standard just after taking office. President Biden’s rule has now advanced farther along in the regulatory process than the Obama administration’s rule was able to, which will make it much harder for a potential second Trump administration to repeal it.

Local updates to floodplain standards have already shown results: Houston, Texas, saw three massive floods in consecutive years between 2015 and 2017. After Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017, the city updated its building regulations to prohibit construction in the 500-year floodplain, forcing builders to elevate homes much higher or build farther back from rivers and streams. These standards likely prevented thousands of homes from flooding earlier this week during Hurricane Beryl, which caused several rivers and bayous to overflow and spill onto surrounding land.

During the 1960s, disability activists fought for the right to live independently, rather than in institutions like nursing homes. That led to the first Center for Independent Living: a hub serving and largely run by people with disabilities, established in Berkeley, California, in 1972—now one of 403 locations across the country. CILs help disabled people live at home who might otherwise have been institutionalized, in part by connecting them with resources like state programs to fund home care.

Now, in the worsening climate crisis, CILs have a new challenge: helping disabled people prepare for and survive extreme weather events, which are becoming both more severe and more frequent. The difficulties they face drive home the disproportionate and often ignored impact of climate change on people with disabilities. Extreme heat, for instance, puts disabled people in particular at increased risk of dying. Losing power can ruin essential medication that needs cold storage. And when it comes to local evacuation plans for wildfires and flooding, mobility issues are often unaccounted for. The list could go on and on.

Disabled people are “two to four times more likely to die or be injured in [climate] disasters or crises than nondisabled people.”

Hundreds of disabled people in the San Francisco Bay Area died as a consequence of power outages between 2005 and 2012, notes Berkeley’s CIL emergency preparedness and outreach coordinator Henry Maeko—a systematic failure that’s put pressure on the region’s natural gas and electricity company, PG&E.

“Because of the harm done to disabled people during power outages and heat waves,” Maeko says, PG&E “has been essentially mandated to provide funds for disability centers and communities in order to provide things like backup batteries.” 

Back-up batteries and generators can be the difference between life and death for people on respirators. Severe temperatures, either hot or cold, can also cause people to experience life-threatening complications. Even in a blue state like California, people with disabilities died in extreme weather before more assistance was provided to CILs in 2020.

But in red states, it’s even more of an uphill battle to secure lifesaving funding and resources for disabled people amid the climate crisis. A Buzzfeed News analysis estimated that more than 700 people died after Texas’ power grid failed during winter storms in 2021. Experts expect these preventable deaths to continue until Texas politicians allow changes to the power grid—which seems very unlikely, given the GOP’s strong hold on the state legislature. 

Before the independent living movement, many disabled people were regularly pushed into locked residential facilities, psychiatric hospitals and other institutions, even from a young age. Through CILs, they can receive one-on-one, in-person assistance, remote classes, and social services while retaining their autonomy (the right for disabled people to live outside institutions didn’t come until a 1999 Supreme Court ruling).

“We got frustrated with traditional agencies, people without disabilities, telling people with disabilities how to live, without that disabled experience,” says Theo Braddy, the executive director of the National Council on Independent Living.

That autonomy can be a matter of life or death. More than once, institutions like nursing homes, prisons, and hospitals have abandoned people in floods and fires, or ignored them in heat waves, with fatal results.

Michael Stein, the executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, said that federal laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act make it a legal issue, not just a moral one, when disabled people are “discriminated against or excluded from federal, state and other programming” like disaster plans.

That includes local governments and organizations like the Red Cross, which still need to have emergency plans that account for the needs of disabled people, said Shaylin Sluzalis and Germán Parodi, the co-executive directors of the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies.  

Disabled people are “two to four times more likely to die or be injured in [climate] disasters or crises than nondisabled people,” Sluzalis said, “largely due to the inaccessible society that we live in.” 

“Finding out two days later that a hurricane struck does no good to people with disabilities.”

One issue that arises, according to Stein, is inaccessible information —such as news about climate events on sites that don’t work with a screen reader. “Receiving the same information at the same time is one of the requirements of disability law,” Stein said. “Finding out two days later that a hurricane struck does no good to people with disabilities.”

Inaccessible climate plans are also an international problem. Although the 2015 Paris Agreement on limiting emissions required “inclusive responses to climate mitigation,” Stein says, almost nine in ten countries that signed “don’t even mention disability in their policies.”

Experts I spoke to agree that disabled people need to be welcomed and heard in climate-related plans. As Braddy notes, when they’re not, “everything is based on the able-bodied experience,” sometimes fatally.

The United States, like many other countries, is ill-prepared for extreme weather in general. The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies maintains a hotline to address that gap by connecting as many disabled people to resources as quickly as possible—especially to their local CIL. 

“One of our main ways of really supporting disabled disaster survivors is connecting them with their local Center for Independent Living,” Sluzalis said. “We do a soft handoff of those referrals, so folks don’t continue to fall through the gaps of calling one place and then calling the next.” 

The partnership’s directors themselves went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in 2017, to try and help disabled disaster survivors. One in three adults in Puerto Rico is disabled, according to the CDC, highlighting the importance of inclusive disaster response in the territory. One of the groups the partnership collaborated with—in addition to FEMA, the Red Cross and local government—is MAVI, a nonprofit which operates two independent living centers in Puerto Rico. 

Back in the Bay Area, Berkeley’s CIL is also helping people prepare for serious earthquakes, including by offering to earthquake-proof their homes. While California has always been known for its earthquakes, research suggests that they will become more common with climate change. Maeko says the center provides both group training and “one-on-one workshops, where we’ll sit with an individual person or a family, we’ll talk through what they might need in emergency preparedness, and we base it on specific needs. We’ll talk about what it would look like for you to be independent during an emergency.”

Braddy believes that governments and agencies collaborating with CILs, both in planning for and during climate events, can help save disabled people’s lives. That includes training Red Cross staffers on how to safely evacuate someone’s wheelchair or ventilator, which are indispensable extensions of a person.

“When emergency-prepared people come into a local community, they don’t know where these individuals live,” Braddy said. “They don’t know the kind of complex medical equipment that these individuals depend on.”

But a local CIL will know just that, Braddy said—something he’s talked to FEMA about. In climate catastrophes, Braddy said, CILs “should be an integral part of that rescue and that management.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) has decried a lack of political will in Western Europe and the US to tackle the global climate crisis as Hurricane Beryl has made landfall as an “extremely dangerous” category 4 storm.

Speaking from his residence in SVG on Monday, Ralph Gonsalves described the unfolding catastrophe as the “monster” storm ripped off rooftops, including that of the 204-year-old St George’s Anglican cathedral in the country’s capital, Kingstown.

“We have no electricity, and while I am talking to you, the rain is beating on the official prime minister’s residence, and the winds are howling. And it’s going to get much worse,” he said. “The coming hours are going to be horrendous.”

Torrential rain and gale-force winds downed power lines, smashed vehicles, and forced thousands into shelters. Videos posted on social media showed aluminum roofing sheets gliding through the air.

In a statement late Monday, Gonsalves said that on Union Island, 90 percent of houses had lost their roofs or been severely damaged.

Warning that there is worse to come, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described Beryl as “life-threatening”.

Beryl strengthened from a tropical depression to a major hurricane in just 42 hours—a phenomenon recorded only six times before in Atlantic hurricane history.

By Sunday morning, countries across the eastern Caribbean, including SVG, Barbados, Grenada, and St Lucia, had been put on hurricane watch. Before the end of the day, a full-blown state of emergency declaration was issued on some islands, with curfews and restrictions on movement.

“For the major emitters of greenhouse gases, those who contribute most to global warning, you are getting a lot of talking, but you are not seeing a lot of action.”

Beryl has also grounded flights and forced the postponement of major events in the region, including the celebrations around the St Vincent Carnival and the 20-nation Caribbean Community (Caricom) leaders’ summit, which was scheduled for this week in Grenada.

Scientists say that human-caused climate breakdown has increased the occurrence of the most intense and destructive tropical storms because warming oceans provide more energy and increase their strength.

With the winds howling in the background, Gonsalves said:

“For the major emitters of greenhouse gases, those who contribute most to global warning, you are getting a lot of talking, but you are not seeing a lot of action—as in making money available to small-island developing states and other vulnerable countries.”

“I am hopeful that what is happening—and we are quite early in the hurricane season—will alert them to our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses and encourage them to honor the commitments they have made on a range of issues, from the Paris accord to the current time.”

SVG—which is still recovering from the effects of a major volcanic eruption in 2021—and neighboring Grenada are bearing the brunt of Hurricane Beryl. After the storm made landfall in Carriacou, one of the islands of Grenada, officials said they had received “reports of devastation”.

Gonsalves referred to COP, the annual UN climate change conference, as “largely a talk shop”.

He also pointed to the UK election campaign as an example of weak political will on climate action.

He said: “Climate change is not playing any major part in the campaigns. While you hear one or two people from the Labour Party talk about it and some concerns from the Greens, it is really not at the core of the messages from the major parties to the British people—for the simple reason that it is not an election winner one way or the other.

“The same thing is happening in other parts of the election in Western Europe and the United States as countries move to the right. It’s a terrible time for small-island developing states and vulnerable countries.”